By now, some of you would probably have read from Mitchell Baker or David Ascher about the re-integration of Mozilla Messaging. It will be combined with Mozilla Labs, and Mozilla Messaging will be dissolved.
David will continue to manage the Thunderbird team along with the various other responsibilities wrt. the Labs stuff, F1, Raindrop, contacts, identity and the like. As he puts it, “Thunderbird users will likely be curious to know what this change means for them. The short answer is almost nothing will change.”
“In particular, the Thunderbird team will remain a tight-knit self-contained product team with full responsibility for the stewardship, development and support of Thunderbird.”
Daniel | 06-Apr-11 at 1:26 am | Permalink
Thank you for the excellent work on a wonderful Outlook alternative!
trog | 06-Apr-11 at 11:21 am | Permalink
I’ve been trying to comment on David Ascher’s blog about this but it seems to eat my comments with no error, so not sure what is going on there, but here’s the feedback I wanted to share:
Sounds interesting – though as a Thunderbird user using it in a business environment (and wanting to use it more!) I’d love to see more stuff thrown into Thunderbird particularly from a groupware point of view.
Outlook/Exchange is still pretty much the best solution for business environments, and while personal messaging is a huge thing I just think it’s going to be in such a state of flux for the next many years (if not for ever!) that it will be a constantly moving target for you guys to focus on.
That is of course probably half the fun though from a development perspective and I’d certainly never want you guys to stop innovating, but I would love to see Thunderbird really mature to the point where it’s a seamless drop-in component replacement for Outlook – either with Exchange or as part of a broader product offering or other third party software.
FWIW we use Zimbra on the mail server side, having wanted to take a punt with something non-Exchange. We’re a small company – around 25 people at the moment. Zimbra works for us; I use Thunderbird for email and need to use Outlook for calendaring because Lightning just doesn’t seem mature/stable/flexible enough for my needs yet.
We’re re-evaluating though – there’s pressure internally to switch to Exchange, because we know we can get an Exchange install up and it will Just Work for everyone’s iPhones, Android phones, mail clients, calendar, etc, etc. We’re not opposed to spending the money, but we’re all big fans of open source and I would love to see everyone in the office running Thunderbird/Lightning for our groupware needs!